I’m a student at college and I always try to digitalize my school stuff. Whether it be downloading a pdf, ppt, or even scanning in my notes. I keep my computer at home but have the webserver running so I can access my files at school computers. The increasing problem that I am running into is that I save lots of things in iWork files which will not open at school computers (either they don’t have iWork or it is an older version that won’t open newer types of files). Should I just give up and start saving everything in Microsoft office files? How have you dealt or would deal with this situation. Thanks.
That’s the “Tower of Babel” effect. Not all documents are viewable on all platforms. This is slowly improving, but still frustrating.
One possibility would be exporting your iWork files as PDF. Assuming that you are using DT Pro or DT Pro Office, you could save the PDFs to the ‘Inbox’ Place in the Finder, which would result in the PDFs being saved to your Global Inbox. Then move the PDFs to a database that’s being ‘broadcast’ by the DTPO Server.
You could export them, alternatively, as MS Office files in the same way. (But I avoid MS Office whenever possible, and you can still run into compatibility problems, e.g., .doc vs .docx, .xls vs .xlsx that remain problematic, e.g., for Apple’s Quick Look.)
There’s a powerful word processor/spreadsheet/database application that can save files in a hybrid PDF file format that remains editable under Papyrus 12 (Windows or Mac) but can be viewed in all platforms as PDF. Unfortunately, Papyrus 12 seems a bit prehistoric in many ways and isn’t as Mac-like as I would like. If only a developer would take it over and bring it up to date! It would go a long way towards solving the ‘Tower of Babel’ effect.
If you’re working mostly with text, you might want to take a look at Pagehand (pagehand.com). It saves natively in pdf, so it’s viewable on other platforms as well. It’s still quite new, so there are a few vital features still missing, but it looks promising though.
Thanks for reminding me about Pagehand. I had tried the first release, but it was buggy for what I needed to do at the time. The current release still lacks some features but I’ve bought a license to encourage the developer. The bugs I had encountered in the initial release didn’t bite me (for a simple copy/paste of RTFD from a document in my database, followed by a bit of editing) in the current version 1.08, which is promising. Inline images transferred with no problem from my RTFD documents.
I like the idea of a word processing document that I can attach to an email without worrying whether the recipient can read it. Needless to say, I also like a word processor document that displays in my DTPO database exactly as it was created. Whether I’ll end up using Pagehand very much remains to be seen, especially as it cannot (yet) do footnotes.
I decided that I would save my files as packages. This allows me to open the quicklook pdf file at any computer. Since all I really need to do is print most of the time this solution works perfectly. If I want to edit a text documents, then that would involve some copy and pasting. Nothing to fancy but it works for me.
Wondering if anyone knows of an alternative to the lousy non-paginating-truncating-don’t-display-landscape Quicklook generators that ship with Offices 2004 & 2008?